


let me be your fortress

by cherryvanilla



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: spnspringfling, Curtain Fic, Domestic, Future Fic, M/M, Reflection, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-23 22:22:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14342175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherryvanilla/pseuds/cherryvanilla
Summary: Some days, Sam can’t help but compare the “then” with the “now.”





	let me be your fortress

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Petite_Madame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petite_Madame/gifts).



> Written for the 2018 spnspringfling for petite_madame using the prompts: scars & stitches, Americana, and laundry day. Set sometime after season 13.
> 
> Thanks to Abby for beta <333

Some days, Sam can’t help but compare the “then” with the “now.” It’s not like he lives in the past or anything, hasn’t for years now. And although he sometimes thinks of a future -- something peaceful, calm, something they’ve built together and can reinforce for generations to come -- he’s pretty firmly living in the _here and now._

It doesn’t stop him, though, from having flashes of the past. They occur at the most innocuous of times, too. Sometimes it’s a sense memory, sometimes it's more akin to déjà vu. It’ll happen after hunts, when they’re bleeding and broken. These days, Dean would rather just go back to the bunker if they can wait long enough. It does something a little funny to Sam’s heart when Dean leads him through the spaces that are _theirs_ to the bathroom, the steady pressure of his palm on the small of Sam’s back. 

Sam’s usually too achy and tired by that point to shrug Dean off, tell him to quit with the big brother-ing. It’s just for show anyway, part of the annoyed little brother script he’s expected to act out when Dean gets all super protective. In all honesty, Sam loves it. Loves that Dean sits him down and loudly opens up drawers and medicine cabinets stuffed full of needles, gauze, alcohol, and ointments. Loves that Dean strokes over his skin when he’s done, like he’s willing Sam whole again, before leading them both to his bedroom where he soothes over the same wounds with his lips and tongue. 

It’s different from the makeshift patch-up jobs they used to do, using whatever they had on hand in the trunk, sat on dingy motel room beds together while Dean muttered to himself that he hoped the needle was sterile enough. The comfort they sought in one another after, though, wasn’t something relegated just for the “now.” It’d been in their lives forever. Sure, there were stops and starts over the years (some stretches longer than others), but Sam has been wrapped up in the everything that is his brother since he was born, and it was their first kiss when he was 17 that had him, in part, boarding that bus to Stanford, the event twisting up his desire for normal just as much as the life their dad had them leading. 

(The kiss, naturally, had happened after a hunt too. Dad was off taking care of the cleanup while Dean, as per usual, took care of Sam. It had been perfect, confusing, vital. But most of all it had been so _much_ , his all-consuming need for Dean, for something they probably shouldn’t allow themselves to have. Once Sam had gotten to Stanford, a Dean-shaped hole inside his heart, he had measured the differences of life without him on a nearly constant basis.)

Nowadays, even if they do patch each other up in motel rooms, they’ve still got more supplies on hand thanks to what’s back at the bunker. Moreover, they’ve got a place to go home to that allows them to take the time and care that’s needed to ensure they’re gonna heal up and be okay. 

Home. It’s still such an odd word, one that had taken Sam a while to come around on. To him, home will always be the car, first and foremost. There’s something about Dean’s sheer joy when they’re just driving down the highway together. It’s infectious. Give Dean the open road, some classic rock, and the endless expanse of Americana spread out before him, and it was all he needed. Somewhere down the line, in the space of trying to find Dad and ultimately finding each other again along the way, it became what Sam needed too. 

That's another time when the past and present collide for Sam. When it’s just the two of them, in the quiet dark of the night, driving down empty interstates at midnight. He’ll look over at Dean, see the sheer contentment on his face, remember when Dean told him that right here, driving down crazy street next to Sam, is where he’s at his best. 

Sam knows it to be true these days, deep in his soul. There were times in the past Dean would overcompensate, try so hard to keep it together for Sam’s sake. Now, though, they talk things out a bit more. It’s still hard for Sam to completely lay his own inner demons on Dean, knowing the way Dean is, how he’ll somehow blame himself for them. But he’s slowly trying. Every day they get stronger, together, because they’re in this until the end, and there’s no question about that, hasn’t been for a long time now. 

So yeah, these are the things Sam thinks about on a nondescript morning like today, when Dean is curled up behind him (most of the time Dean insists on being the bigger spoon, shutting Sam down with a firm “Older,” even though it really doesn’t make sense) and Sam has been awake for at least an hour, yet not willing to move lest he awaken Dean. 

(Alright, so maybe he also loves the feel of Dean wrapped around him like a human octopus, like he was trying to protect Sam from the horrors of the world even in sleep.)

Dean finally begins to stir, his nails scraping along the coarse hair of Sam’s stomach. “Mmph, time?” 

Sam smirks and peers at the red glow of the digital alarm clock. “8.” 

Dean’s yawn is muffled by Sam’s shoulder. “Aww, look at you, sleepin’ in for me.” 

Sam snorts. “Yeah, the things I do for your lazy ass.” 

“Better be nice to my lazy ass,” Dean murmurs, biting at Sam’s shoulder blade, “or you won’t get one’a my world famous blowjobs.” 

Sam simply rolls his eyes at the idle threat. He’d long ago learned that Dean loved giving Sam blowjobs almost more than Sam enjoyed receiving them. Three minutes later, he’s proven right, with Dean kneeling between his spread thighs, lazily licking up and down his cock, like they have all day. Sam folds his arms behind his head and sighs, keening upward into Dean’s mouth as his eyes drift shut. 

This is something he loves about having a home base: the way they take the time to just _be_ , whenever the weight of the world isn’t pressing down around them. The way they can (and have) spend an entire day in bed, relearning one another’s bodies again and again, even though they’ve never truly forgotten them. 

“Turn that brain off, Sammy, I’m busy here,” Dean rasps as he breaks away from Sam’s dick with an obscene pop. 

Sam laughs quietly, unable to escape how well Dean knows him, and drags his fingernails over Dean’s scalp, pushing his head down and moaning as Dean takes him in deep. 

He doesn’t think again until after they’re both spent and sated and lying naked in one another’s arms. 

Dean's fingertips trace idle patterns on Sam’s chest. “Gotta get up sometime, I suppose,” he murmurs unhappily into Sam’s skin, the press of Dean’s lips sending a shiver through his core. “Laundry day.” 

Sam’s lips twitch in a smile, his own fingers stroking through the short strands of Dean’s hair. It's Tuesday and thus, laundry day. The task has taken on a different meaning over the years. During their first year out on the road together, laundry day consisted of Dean grumbling while they waited for the clothes to be done, bored out of his mind with nothing to watch but daytime TV. He’d sit stretched across the plastic seats with a Twizzler hanging from his lips and a car magazine in his hands (because even Dean had the good sense not to bring a porn mag into a laundromat in the middle of the day) while Sam would contemplate how much things had changed in his life since leaving Stanford. How if the fire hadn’t happened, he would’ve been sitting in his Language, Culture & Society Anthro class, counting down the minutes until he could go home so he and Jess could start Taco Tuesday. 

Dean probably would’ve loved it back then if Sam had suggested they add tacos to laundry day, but he couldn’t. It had been archived away with what he’d lost and couldn’t attempt replicating, not even with Dean. 

One time in that first year, during a particularly annoying laundromat experience in which there were screaming children, broken coin machines, and Dean sitting in gum on one of the chairs, Dean had sighed and said, “One of these days, Sammy, you n’ me will have our own damn washer and dryer. Just you wait.” 

Sam had merely shaken his head in rueful laughter and gone back to his book with a heaviness in his chest, unable to remind Dean that he still did plan on going back to California, that he didn’t envision this as his life. 

And yet, Dean hadn’t been wrong. Because somehow through all of the craziness in their lives, and the losses and pain, they’d gained the bunker and with it, a kitchen and laundry room and, more importantly, a home with one another that didn’t include four wheels. 

And Sam didn’t want to be anywhere else. 

“I love laundry day,” he says quietly, guiding his hand down the warm skin of Dean’s back. 

“Yeah,” Dean replies after a pause, “yeah, so do I, Sammy.” 

They both know neither of them are talking about washing clothes. 

[end]


End file.
